Game of Thrones honchos David Benioff and D. B. Weiss jump from fantasy to science fiction with this lavish adaptation of Chinese author Liu Cixin’s sprawling, ambitious, and cerebral novel, The Three-Body Problem. Expectations are dizzyingly high.
When is 3 Body Problem being released in New Zealand?
3 Body Problem is streaming in New Zealand exclusively on Netflix from March 21.
3 Body Problem: Season 1
What is 3 Body Problem about?
If you look up “difficult to summarise” in the dictionary you won’t find anything, because that’s a sentence, not a word, but let’s have a crack. Kicking off in Communist China circa the Cultural Revolution, 3 Body Problem follows how an impulsive decision by politically disgraced astrophysicist Ye Wenjie has dire consequences in the modern day, where intelligence operative Da Shi is investigating a rash of sudden suicides in the international scientific community.
Does it have something to do with the mysterious VR game called Three-Body? More than likely. Is this all presaging an alien invasion? Well, yes—but not in the way you might think.
The cast of 3 Body Problem
Rosalind Chao and Zine Tseng are Ye Wenjie in different time periods; Benedict Wong is Da Shi; and they’re surrounded by a large and impressive ensemble that includes Jess Hong, Jovan Adepo, Eiza González, John Bradley, Alex Sharp, Jonathan Pryce, Ben Schnetzer, Liam Cunningham, Marlo Kelly, Sea Shimooka, Saamer Usmani, and Eve Ridley. Some familiar Game of Thrones faces in there.
3 Body Problem trailer
Why we’re excited about 3 Body Problem
Liu Cixin’s novel is one of those big and wildly ambitious mind-melters that puts fresh folds in your brain, so we are extremely keen to see how it translates to the screen. Of course, this isn’t the first time that’s been attempted. A 30-part Mandarin-language adaptation was released in China in January 2023, and then there’s the shelved feature film adaptation—although the less said about that, the better.
Boiling down all of the book’s meaty material into something a streaming audience can parse is a big ask, but it’s not like the creative team haven’t faced similar challenges before. If they nail it, this will be one of the year’s must-see series.
